Damn and blast - bust someone else's trem!!!!

My boss at work has a cheap and rather poor Charvel in an unplayable state - damaged fret, intonation all level with eachother(!), trem all over the place etc. As I like doing up guitars I said I'd get it sorted over the weekend. I noticed from the back that the trem block had crumbled away a bit and pointed it out to him. Anyway, stripped it down, fixed the fret and polished them all, checked the electrics and then started to reassemble. DISASTER!!!! I put the springs back on the trem block, merely lifted it up from the guitar body, pivoting to get it level - and it crumbled and broke off the base plate!! Unbelievably cheap crap, but now I need to try and do something to fix it???? A bit of research and it is a Jackson JT280 (WB2). A Floyd Rose license apparently made by Wilkinson.

I don't think I'm gonna get a replacement block from anywhere - anyone got any ideas on that??? I guess I'll have to try and find a replacement trem from somewhere

Comments

Oooooo I havn't seen one of those in years ... had em on Encores and loads of cheap and nasty 'widdly' Strats back in the early 90s. Absolute junk ... lord knows what you'd do for spares .... Perhaps a Wilkinson 2 point strat would fit.

If it has a locking nut the Wilkinson 2-point won't really do the job even if it fits - no fine tuners. There is an old model of Kahler which might fit - what's the post spacing? That might be a bit of a long-term Ebay search anyway though.

The only suggestion I can come up with if you can't find anything that fits the posts is, if there's enough left of the old block to get measurements, see if Andy at Wudtone could make a replacement steel block. Won't be cheap though...

"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone."

Unfortunately the block is pretty complicated as it needs all the fine tuner gubbins, so I don't think machining a new one is practical. This is a real bummer, I honestly can't think of a gameplan to get useable. The annoying thing is that there must be a shedload of these lying in a box or three somewhere on the planet.

Don't forget that even if you bought a better replacement trem, it's crucial that the posts are as good as the trem that rests on them. I'd image that the posts on that guitar are naff too and would prevent the new trem from functioning properly, so in that case you have to make sure that either the thread of the inserts matches the new posts perfectly, or that the size of the inserts from the new trem are an exact match for the old ones.

Sorry I should be clearer there, what I meant was that you could then put the new trem on the old posts if you were blocking it off and weren't worried about using it as a full-floater. You never know though, you might get lucky with that set above and the posts might be a perfect match

Which looks even more basic and says it's 74mm. Even if that's bigger than the post spacing on the guitar (from the pic it looks like about 70mm but that's just from holding a ruler up to the screen!) the bridge baseplate will probably be soft enough that you could file the knife edge cut-outs 'oval' until it fits. It might not work perfectly but at least it would work and be an improvement over a broken piece of crap...

"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone."